One of the most interesting things to come from Apple’s announcement of their new Apple TV 4K streaming media player is that they’ll now be selling 4K movies in their iTunes Store at the same price as the HD versions, which is $19.99 or less. That’s usually much less than Amazon’s 4K movie prices, which can sometimes even exceed the movie’s 4K Blu-ray price. Pocket Lint notes that Amazon’s 4K movie prices have now decreased, which is likely a response to Apple’s announcement. I haven’t had the chance to verify the new prices myself, but hopefully, this means that 4K content as a whole, across all digital stores, will no longer demand a premium over their pixel-impaired counterparts.

In my experience, while the picture quality of 4K streaming content from Amazon is noticeably improved over the picture quality of their 1080p streaming content, I still maintain that the picture quality of a 4K blu-ray disc is far superior.

In addition, oftentimes the film on a 4K blu-ray disc is mastered in a much higher audio format, such as Dolby Atmos or DTS:X. However, the 4K streaming content from Amazon does not contain these high-end audio tracks. Even most blu-ray discs support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, both of which are lossless. The streaming content from Amazon is delivered in either Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound or Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 sound, however, the audio tracks are compressed using lossy compression.

Conclusion: Both the picture quality and the audio quality of a film are much higher on a 4K blu-ray disc than they are on a 4K stream from Amazon.

This really isn’t an issue of anyone forcing Amazon’s hand. Amazon’s deal, and indeed most content providers deals have a clause that if a better deal is struck with another partner Amazon will have a right to those terms as well. This is part of what we saw with ebook pricing during that battle. Apple forced a better deal here with the studios, and as a result Amazon was able to also capitalize on that to get the same terms.

This is really as it should be. And to take it a step further, with digital distribution, there is absolutely no reason a customer should have to pay again for a different resolution. When 4k becomes available, it ought to upgrade you automatically if you already own the movie. Pay once flat, reasonable license fee for the movie, and get access to whatever resolutions are available. Bandwidth availability has far than outpaced video quality, so the “cost” to Amazon of streaming the movie at a higher resolution than you originally paid for is a moot point (made obvious by the fact that they don’t charge extra to provide Prime content in 4k).